[cmath] THREE HONOURED FOR EXCEPTIONAL RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS (March 13, 2007)

[Graham Wright]

For release: IMMEDIATE (March 13, 2007)

THREE HONOURED FOR EXCEPTIONAL RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) has selected Martin Barlow as 
the recipient of the 2008 Jeffery-Williams Prize, Izabella Laba as the 
recipient of the 2008 Krieger-Nelson Prize, and Vinayak Vastal as the 
winner of the 2007 Coxeter-James Prize.

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CMS 2008 Jeffery-Williams Prize: Dr. Martin Barlow (University of British 
Columbia)
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The Jeffery-Williams Prize recognizes mathematicians who have made 
outstanding contributions to mathematical research. Professor Martin 
Barlow is the leading international expert in the study of diffusions 
on fractals and other disordered media. He has made a number of 
profound contributions to a variety of fields including probabilistic 
methods in partial differential equations, stochastic differential 
equations, filtration enlargement, local times, measure-valued 
diffusions and mathematical finance.

In the 1980's he resolved a thirty year old problem with his derivation of 
necessary and sufficient conditions (the latter with John Hawkes) for the 
continuity of local time of a Lévy process. This was the resolution of a 
problem which had attracted the efforts of Hale Trotter, Ronald Getoor and 
Harry Kesten among others.

In the 1990's he carried out a detailed study of diffusions on a variety of 
fractal-like sets and derived precise upper and lower bounds on their heat 
kernels. This work laid the groundwork for a new area of study in probability 
which has attracted experts in Dirichlet forms, diffusions on manifolds and 
statistical mechanics. He currently is at the forefront of a program to study 
the transport properties of a broad class of graphs and manifolds. The original 
motivation for the study of diffusion on fractals came from the physics 
community who were interested in more general disordered random media but 
viewed typical fractals like the Sierpinski carpets and gaskets as good testing 
grounds for highly inhomogeneous media. Thanks in large part to the pioneering 
efforts of Martin Barlow the discipline has reached the point where the 
original objectives of the physicists are now within mathematical reach. Barlow 
remains at the leading edge of this research with his recent work giving sharp 
results for the behaviour of transition probabilities for random walks on 
super-critical percolation clusters.

Martin Barlow received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University in 
1975 and completed his Doctoral degree with David Williams at the University 
College of Swansea in Wales in 1978. He held Royal Society University Research 
Fellowship at Cambridge University from 1985 to 1992, when he joined the 
Mathematics Department at University of British Columbia. He currently is 
Professor of Mathematics at UBC. He has held a number of visiting 
professorships at leading universities including University of Tokyo, Cornell 
University, Imperial College, London, and Université de Paris.

Past distinctions include the Rollo Davidson Prize from Cambridge University, 
the Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society and an invited 
lecture at the 1990 ICM in Kyoto. He has served the Canadian mathematical 
community on the Research Committee of the CMS and on the Editorial Board of 
the Canadian Journal Mathematics and the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin. He 
also has served on a number of international panels and editorial boards and 
recently finished a term as Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Communications in 
Probability. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 2006 was 
elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London).

Dr. Barlow will present the 2008 Jeffery-Williams Prize Lecture at the CMS 
Summer Meeting in Montréal (June 2008).

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CMS 2008 Krieger-Nelson Prize: Dr. Izabella Laba (University of British 
Columbia)
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The Krieger-Nelson Prize recognizes outstanding research by a female 
mathematician.

Izabella Laba has established a position as one of Canada's leading harmonic 
analysts. She has made major contributions to the Kakeya problem, and to the 
study of translational tilings and distance sets.

Although her current work is in harmonic analysis, Laba began her career 
working in on N-body scattering theory in mathematical physics. After obtaining 
her Ph.D. in 1994 at the University of Toronto with Michael Sigal she first 
attracted attention with her proof (with Christian Gérard) of asymptotic 
completeness for a large class of N-body systems in the presence of a magnetic 
field. This work became the subject of a monograph in the AMS mathematical 
surveys and monographs series.

During her time as Hedrick Assistant Professor at UCLA, Laba interests turned 
to harmonic analysis. A central problem in this field is the Kakeya conjecture 
concerning Besicovitch sets. A Besicovitch set is a subset of n-dimensional 
Euclidean space containing a line segment in every direction. The Kakeya 
conjecture states that such a set must have Minkowski and Hausdorff dimension 
n. This conjecture is linked to important open problems in harmonic analysis 
like the restriction conjecture and the Bochner-Riesz conjecture. To date, the 
best known lower bound on the dimension of a Besicovitch set in three 
dimensions is due to Katz, Laba and Tao.

After her time at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Laba moved to 
Princeton and then in 2000 to the University of British Columbua where she was 
promoted to full Professor in 2005. Here she has continued her work in harmonic 
analysis, with important results in study of translational tilings and distance 
sets.

In addition to her research articles and the monograph mentioned above, Laba 
(with Carol Shubin) co-edited Thomas Wolff's ?Lectures in Harmonic Analysis?, 
which he had left uncompleted at the time of his death.

Laba's outstanding work has been recognized with a UBC Faculty of Science 
Achievement Award for Research in 2002 and the CMS Coxeter-James Prize in 2004.

Dr. Laba will present the 2008 Krieger-Nelson Prize Lecture at the CMS Summer 
Meeting in Montréal (June 2008).


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CMS 2007 Coxeter-James Prize: Dr Vinayak Vastal (University of British 
Columbia)
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The Coxeter-James Prize recognizes young mathematicians who have made 
outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Vinayak Vatsal has made fundamental contributions to the Iwasawa Theory of 
elliptic curves, introducing profound techniques from ergodic theory into the 
subject and obtaining startling theorems on the non-vanishing of p-adic 
L-functions and mu-invariants that had previously been unobtainable by more 
orthodox analytic methods. His 2002 Inventiones paper on the uniform 
distribution of Heegner points led to the complete solution of a fundamental 
conjecture of Mazur concerning such L-functions (now the Vatsal-Cornut 
theorem). In the words of his referees, these results have ?transformed our 
understanding of the ranks of elliptic curves in towers of number fields?.

Dr. Vatsal received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1992 from Stanford 
University and a Ph.D. in 1997 from the Princeton University under the 
supervision of Professor Andrew Wiles. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the 
University of Toronto, he joined the University of British Columbia in 1999, 
where he is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics.

Dr. Vatsal was selected as a Sloan Fellow for 2002-2004, he received the 2004 
André Aisenstadt Prize of the Centres de Recherches Mathématiques, the 2006 
Ribenboim Prize of the Canadian Number Theory Association and was an invited 
speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

Dr. Vinayak Vatsal will present the 2007 Coxeter-James Prize Lecture at the CMS 
Winter Meeting hosted by the University of Western Ontario in December 2007.

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For more information contact:

Dr. Thomas S. Salisbury			Dr. Graham P. Wright
President 				Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society 	ou	Canadian Mathematical Society
416-736-2100 x33921			(613) 562-5702
president at cms.math.ca			director at cms.math.ca